But those were the days before the rude awakening from the dream that the world was to repose for ever in the soft wrappings of universal peace. Questions of national defence bored Englishmen. The judgment of the greatest strategical authority of the age weighed less than one of Lord Haldane's verbose platitudes, and the urgent warnings of Lord Roberts less than the impudent snub administered to him by an Under-Secretary. Speakers on public platforms found that sympathy with Ulster carried a more potent appeal to their audience than any other they could make on the Irish question, and they naturally therefore concentrated attention upon it. Liberals, excited alternately to fury and to ridicule by the proceedings in Belfast, heaped denunciation on Carson and the Covenant, thereby impelling their opponents to vehement defence of both; and the result of all this was that before the end of 1912 the sun of Imperial policy which had drawn the homage of earlier defenders of the Union was almost totally eclipsed by the moon of Ulster. When Parliament reassembled for the autumn session in October the Prime Minister immediately moved a "guillotine" resolution for allotting time for the remaining stages of the Home Rule Bill, and, in resisting this motion, Mr. Bonar Law made one of the most convincing of his many convincing speeches against the whole policy of the Bill. It stands for all time as the complete demonstration of a proposition which he argued over and over again--that Home Rule had never been submitted to the British electorate, and that that fact alone was full justification for Ulster's resolve to resist it. It was impossible for any democratic Minister to refute the contention that even if the principle of the Government's policy had been as frankly submitted to the electorate as it had in fact been carefully withheld, it would still remain true that the intensity of the Ulster opposition was itself a new factor in the situation upon Which the people were entitled to be consulted. There was a limit, said Mr. Bonar Law, to the obligation to submit to legally constituted authority, and that limit was reached "in a free country when a body of men, whether they call themselves a Cabinet or not, propose to make a great change like this for which they have never received the sanction of the people."